On Sunday, May 22, 2011 11:24:22 AM UTC-4, singhals wrote: > Tom Wetmore wrote: > > > > As Wes pointed out, there is nothing preventing a user of "ordinary" programs creating separate persons for each "evidence person" and then merging them into the final person later when they decide who is who. This is what I have to do with my program now. The problem with this approach is that once you merge you loose your research history. We need nondestructive merges, which I believe is best done by just building up trees of person records. > > Have you been shown the members-only part of the > newfamilysearch databases? If you have not, I /urge/ you to > find a Mormon who will show you his own family there. > They eschewed the notion of "merge" for the more seductive > "combine" which, frankly, works no better than "merge" in > the hands of the hurried except that with "combine" you can > sometimes see who last did what. > > The results of that push me deeper into a belief that you've > got to plump for Yes it is/No it isn't at some point and > that point may as well be now, since you're never going to > get proof-absolute or even *all* potentially pertinent data > (since as has been said here before, data has the > uncomfortable habit of popping up where it has no earthly > reason to be ...). > > My genie program of choice has a free-form text section, > into which I put my research notes (ie, birthyear extrap > from census; month from census; day of month from tombstone; > marriage name & date from copy of certificate; death from > tombstone), and then when I merge two people, I also merge > these notes, which creates a nice trail and enables me to > see why I thought something (or didn't think so). > > Cheryl Cheryl, I did manage to get a New Family Search account and have worked with it a little bit. The problem with that system is simply that it is filled to overflowing with trash data. nFS uses the persona concept, but they have no way to enforce the idea that a persona comes from an item of evidence. Most of their personas are just stuff extracted from somebody's junk. I don't think you can draw any real conclusions about the persona idea from the way nFS was implemented. Note that nFS is a two-tiered system -- there is a datatype for persona and there is a datatype for person, and they are different. Personas are grouped into persons, and the user can select which persona to use for each of the important life events for the person. in other words, the user can choose which persona gets to be the "birth persona", which gets to be the "death" persona, and so on. However, there is no way a user can patch up persons when they get married off to the wrong persons! By and large I think the nFS approach with personas and persons is a quantum leap in the right direction. Their implementation of the idea might be lacking, and their choice of "stocking the tree" with garbage was an incredibly wrong thing to do, but the idea is right in my humble opinion. Just imagine the great world we would have if instead they stocked the tree with personas created from all the vital records they have, from all the census records they have, all the military records they have. We would start with a wonderful universe of personas extracted from the primary records of the world. Not to open too many pandora's boxes at once, but I also believe that if you can start with this universe of personas, you can take advantage of automatic combination algorithms to do a lot of the grouping of personas. I advocate two changes to the nFS system. First, don't have two datatypes, just go for a single one for both evidence persons and conclusion persons. Second, don't have any limits on the tiers. Yeah, most times there will be only two tiers, three rarely, and more probably never. Buy why limit it when it matches the way we think. Tom

On May 22, 4:59 pm, Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> wrote: > I advocate two changes to the nFS system. First, don't have two datatypes, just go for a > single one for both evidence persons and conclusion persons. Second, don't have any limits > on the tiers. Yeah, most times there will be only two tiers, three rarely, and more probably > never. Buy why limit it when it matches the way we think. There are a few situations where I can imagine wanting three tiers. I often mentally group a person's personae into two parts: those from their childhood (e.g. their birth, baptism, and appearing on censuses with their parents); and those from their adulthood (e.g. marriage, the birth and baptism of their children, and appearing on censuses with their spouse and children). I often find it easy to group childhood personae together, and to group adult personae, but much harder to workout which child grows up to become which adult. So I can imagine wanting to use one tier to represent personae which are almost certainly the same person and a second tier for less certain identifications. Another example is if some secondary/tertiary source has already compiled several personae into an individual, and you want to take that, document the origin of the grouping, and then build on it yourself. So yes, I think multiple levels would be good, but really it's the ability to have two that's critical. Richard